page 1452 – May Takes Shipping Seriously
HOLY CRAP, I JUST DID TWO WEEKS WORTH OF COMICS IN 48 HOURS. If you’re just now stumbling onto Far Out There because you picked up some litter while at Otakon, you need to understand that I normally don’t start work on these comics until… well, frequently a few hours after they were supposed to be online already. The fact that the comic you’re seeing right now was queued up on the site an entire TWO WEEKS ahead of time is highly unusual. Such are the miracles of having to plan around being out of town for several days. And if that wasn’t enough, as I write this back on July 21st, I’m also HOPING to go ahead and have August 3rd’s page finished and queued up before heading out to the con, just so I’ll have more time to recover once I get back. Or, heck, just so I’ll have more time to recover from this crazy productivity binge I went on to get this much done in one stretch.
EDIT: Well, this is embarrassing. I actually managed to get a new TWC Voting Incentive done before I left… but then I forgot to actually swap out the existing one before hitting the road. I feel kinda dumb. BUT IT’S UP NOW! Really! I promise!
MAY! The joke started two years before Ichabod met his girlfriend. I know you’re an only child, but you SHOULD have spent SOME time to trying to understand sibling dynamics at some point in the past. The fact that you aren’t treating Mariska’s relationship with Ichabod as a sibling relationship is on you.
I don’t think it’s been officially established one way or another (because you know how I am about these things) but it definitely does SEEM like May is an only child, doesn’t it?
Given everything we know about her, I feel like if she isn’t an only child she became a Junior Nitpicker before the birth of her sibling/s, and has at least never lived with them.
Actually, I like that idea. I put forth the suggestion that May technically isn’t an Only Child, but for all practical purposes she’s never been a Sibling, either. Instead, she’s more a Young Aunt to her sibling/s, someone who randomly enters their lives for a week or so before disappearing for months at a time.
Oh, and, her Siblings don’t have her fanaticism for Gear-Based Technology, and find her craze about it simultaneously confusing and embarrassing.
The confusing: “If you love Gear Tech so much, why do you keep leaving the only planet where it’s the central technological focus!”.
The embarrassing: “This is May, she’s kinda our Weird Aunt who left to become a Nitpicker because she was too clumsy to successfully become a Gear Technician. No, I’m not going to call you my sister, you’re a decade older than me and crazy!”
OOOOOooooh, I particularly find this compelling because it addresses one of my (appropriately) nitpicky problems with May’s background. As much as it works from a joke-telling standpoint, I’ve always been a bit annoyed with the whole “Planet of Hats” approach to writing whole populations as having a single, monolithic cultural trait. It’s already established that the Steampunk tech isn’t really a necessity there any more, so having there be different sub-cultures with different attitudes toward all the gears would make things a lot more compelling!
My thoughts on May’s Home Planet, and many other planets in a similar position, is that “It was once a necessity, but now it’s a tourism thing”. They keep the Gear-Based Tech because it is a relatively cheap & easy way to bring in the Tourist Dollar, not because it’s necessary.
Actually, if you haven’t given her Parents any type of job at the moment, make it so that they HAD something to do with inspecting Tourist Hotels throughout the time May was a child. Then, make it so that the Big Hotels are required to run all of their tech through the Steampunk Gear-Tech, simply to get Rich Tourists in the doors, and, possibly unknown to May, very few locals of her own planet actually USE Gear-Tech anymore, with the Gear Technicians either dealing with the Big Public Gears, or focusing on decorations for Tech that doesn’t actually run off of the Gears, just to make it look right.